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June 1, 2007

When talking about design across-the-board, it’s harder to define what is the best based on a singular standard, as compared to deciding which is more aesthetically pleasing than the other. After all, like most human creations, there may be no exact definition or standard to define or embody perfect design at any cost, especially given the subjective perspective by which each individual may look upon any object.

However, there is such a thing coined by many as optimal web design. Optimal, by virtue of its definition alone, already means the most favorable or desired form of any particular subject. This then translates to what is optimal web design which is web design that best suits the tastes of the greater majority, while at the same time working within the feasibility constraints of any undertaking.

What then makes web design optimal? Web design is optimal when it seeks to provide maximum utility to users while providing business or operational viability. In this way, the designer is able to best provide for the demand of both the end consumers as well as the people who plan and conceptualize for the purpose of deriving profit.

Putting the end users in mind is another means in order to emphasize what’s in every web designer’s mind friendlier usability for each and every user. This means taking into consideration the fact that people visit websites in order to find particular content; therefore, it is imperative that the content must always take the precedence over any other accents and extraneous designs or artwork.

The more effective web designers are not afraid to make use of white backgrounds, or generally very clean lines in their website. By limiting the use of unrelated pictures that may even cause loading the page to take longer, and adding in very integral elements like the title and an outline of the contents of the page, it brings attention back to the content over anything else.

Pictures, unless completely necessary, should be used sparingly. When it would take longer than usual to load due to the size or the volume of pictures, it is recommended to forewarn users so that they may opt out of viewing pictures and instead proceed to seeking content they need. Moreover, advertisements and their placements, when possible, must be planned so that while they will serve their purpose, they will also in no way cause distraction or distaste to the visitors of the website.

Moreover, navigation is made consistent and simple in order to make accessing content as simple and as easy as possible. After all, who’s to say if everyone who surfs the Internet have the same capacities to grasp and decipher navigational tactics and the like.

Integrate into the design a means through which each and every visitor may have access to basic information about the website and its proponents (usually in the ‘About’ page), as well as a means of access to the privacy statement of the company. After all, the latter has played a big role in building or inversely destroying many relationships on the Internet.

An additional means in order to have an optimal web design is by using rudimentary conventions in web design; like making clear buttons, describing links accurately, and displaying links in the conventional blue. In this manner, the website will accommodate even the older users without the same sort of grounding with the use of the computer, and will make sure that users have the least amount of trouble in just trying to access a design.

However, there are also particular selling points that will assure marketability and will reflect business viability to its necessary degree. First and foremost, aesthetic design and code design are very much limited by the resources made available by the company. It is also important that the website has the capacity to meld in with the strategies undertaken by the company.

The first consideration in the optimal business viability of a website are the limitations experienced and set in order to create it. This includes the limitations on space, the domain address, as well as the terms and conditions that a company would have to sign in order to enlist services.

Moreover, optimal web design when it comes to business applications when the website is able to integrate itself to all the collective efforts, like marketing strategies and the like, of any company hoping to gain an edge through the Internet. This means that in the end, while aesthetics play an important role, creating an optimal web design is still one that best accommodates without alienation its users, sponsors, and web design planners.

You may not realize it, but many of your website visitors form an immediate opinion about you and your website. The opinion that is formed in this instantaneous way is done so subconsciously. You might wonder why this happens. It has absolutely nothing to do with the text on your website. And yet your visitor will still form their instant opinion without even reading a single word of your costly copy.

It doesn’t matter either, whether the quality of the images on your website are of the highest. Nor does your offer matter. You could be promoting a sensational deal, like selling dollars for dimes. But this too, will be overlooked by the site visitor. This is because the instant opinion is made when your web page is displayed to your visitor. You may have guessed there is something subliminal at work here. In a way, that is right. Immediate opinions are formed by visitors to every single website. This may surprise you, but the answer is colors. Your visitor’s instant opinion of your website is primarily due to the color scheme which you have used.

This is because colors are psychological. They engender an intuitive reaction which we can’t control. We can’t help ourselves. Colors bring us these emotions and feelings whether we want them or not! As you will know, millions are spent by big companies in deciding the correct colors of new products and in their marketing campaigns. Big companies realize that colors are a psychological feature, and they can influence our reception of their marketing. In their business propositions, the big companies understand that the use of appropriate colors is a key element. What webmasters have to realize, and this can be very important, is that the same color psychology applies to our web pages.

By the psychological power you could encourage your website visitors to leave your page the instant they see it. No matter what your website is about, it may simply be unsuccessful due to the colors you’re using. Forget the text, it might never be read! The good news, however, is that you can use colors to engender a really positive reaction. This color psychology is nothing new. In fact, it’s been with us for years and years. Whatever our role in life, colors convey emotions to our subconscious mind.

For example, a particular color scheme could convey a good feeling in each of us. However, a different color scheme might convey not so good feelings. In essence, you might send a sense trust, warmth and belonging. Conversely, the feeling sent may be one of distrust, coolness and rejection. The following list gives an idea of the emotions associated with their respective colors:

When designing your web pages, you ideally need to ensure that the color scheme you use is consistent with your offering. The reason is that your visitors’ subconscious minds will look to reconcile the color with the message. If they are irreconcilable, you will find your visitors click away from your page very quickly. Which means, your visitor will be lost. The important issue therefore is that it is essential the right color scheme is used on your website. If you do this, your website will produce the results you’re looking for. In summary, the difference between the right and wrong color scheme on your website can be the difference between profit and loss.

An absolute tracking as well as reporting system is now to be had to help you understand and analyze ecommerce web site design and appraise the performance of marketing strategies of current market.

At this moment, it is straightforward to get ecommerce web site design for web site. Proclamation will contain synopsis of statistics and graphs of the web design to your site for the day, in addition to an optional detailed line-by-line listing of each sightseer to your web site, together with the date, time, visitor domain, referring site, pages accessed, keywords used in search engine, along with many more. Our ecommerce web site design service is easy to put into practice all you require to do is sign up, then copy, and paste a small morsel of coding to your web pages.

After get joint with us, we will provide you ecommerce web site design services, which govern your webmaster who will paste this block of code into your HTML pages in a few seconds. Ecommerce web site design is the simplest way for web marketers, managers, company executives, besides to webmasters to get the answers to some simple but important problems. It could be any easier that there are no such scripts to arrange or programs to run on the server. Towards the end of each day, we will go through ecommerce web site design for your web site.

In case, if you are the owner of several sites and wishes to receive statistics for each of them, there is no require to register each web site independently. As a result, a free hit counter will be generating on your page and that web counter can be invisible in addition to get hold of detailed statistics you can visit stats page or subscribe to stats through e-mail. Clearpath Technology is a provider of ecommerce web site design service, provides detailed information about your site’s sightseers.

In the world of web design, there are plenty of mistakes you can make, and in this article, I’m going to look at what I believe to be the top 10 biggest. You need to check your site for these mistakes right now, and fix them if they’re there â€“ otherwise you’re going to be annoying your visitors and driving them away from your site.

1. Unclear Layout and Navigation. Many websites, especially business sites, seem to suffer from some kind of disease where even the very simplest task takes ten steps to achieve. If people are emailing you to ask you how to do things on your site, then you need to improve your layout and navigation. Remember: if there are certain tasks people seem to want to do more often, put them on the front page.

2. Plugin Overload. You’ve got to keep media that uses plugins to a strict maximum of one per page: that means that if you’ve got Flash, then you can’t have a media player, or if you’re using Java then you can’t have Flash. It’s not as bad to use the same plugin twice, however.

3. Unclear Linking. You might think it looks better to only show links when people put their mouse over them, or not make their colour stand out too much from the rest of the text, but it’s not â€“ while it might make the design look nicer, it makes it far less usable. Use a clearly contrasting colour for links, and preferably underline them.

4. Too Many Ads. When you’re trying to make money from your website, it’s all too easy to try to fit in more ads than you really should, or start using ad formats that are too intrusive. If you’ve put a new ad on your site, go to the site as if you were a visitor, and ask yourself honestly: is this just too much?

5. Strange Fonts. Stick to the most common web fonts: that’s pretty much just Arial, Georgia, Tahoma and Verdana. If you’re using more obscure fonts, then most visitors probably won’t have them â€“ and the ones that do will find your text hard to read. The only time you should use non-standard fonts is in your logo or in headings, if they are displayed as an image.

6. Flash Intros. Please, don’t use a Flash intro on your website. You’d think everyone would realise they’re a bad idea by now, but every web designer still gets clients who just don’t seem to realise that Flash intros are universally mocked and hated. Don’t be one of those people.

7. Unlabelled Email Links. It’s a very bad idea to ever use a link that will send email (a mailto link) without clearly marking it with the word ‘email’. If you just make clicking people’s names send email, you’ll annoy visitors who just clicked wanting to find out more about the person.

8. Broken Links. You’ve got to check all your links regularly to make sure that they all still work. There’s nothing worse than finding a site that looks useful, only to find that it hasn’t been updated in years and none of the links work any more. Yes, a website does mostly run itself after a while, but that doesn’t mean that you should neglect the essential maintenance it needs from time to time.

9. No Marking for External Links. There are two kinds of links: internal (to other parts of your website) and external (to other websites). For the benefit of your visitors, though, it’s best if you mark external links, either by making them a different colour or using some kind of a symbol (a box with an arrow is the usual one). It’s also good to make the external links open in new windows, so people aren’t leaving your site altogether when they click them.

10. Badly-sized Text. It’s important to keep your text around the standard size (preferably just below). Making text too big or too small makes it hard to read and annoying for many visitors. The best thing you can do is use relative text sizing (not pixels) that allows the browser to respect the user’s preferred text size. You might also consider offering buttons on your site to decrease or increase the size.

May 31, 2007

Getting stuff for free is often more complicated than it looks, but if you are clever you can get free banner designs or other valuable online marketing tools. Although in most cases, the quality of a free banner design will be modest, you can also get nice looking banners for absolutely no cost. How? There are different ways in which you can achieve this:

Freelance designers - many freelance designers who are just starting out are looking to build their portfolio, so getting a free banner design from them is not impossible. For a freelancer, the online portfolio is the maker or breaker of his business, so he or she will often offer to work for free. The problem with asking for a free banner design from a freelancer is that you cannot have any saying as far as the quality is concerned and you won’t really have the power to request revisions and changes to the banner ads. Anyone relatively skilled in a graphic design software, such as Adobe’s Photoshop , can create a free banner ad - or a cheap banner, but you can also try it yourself, if you are on a small budget.

Graphic design company promotions - many graphic design company managers know that, in order to win money online and build a reputable image, you need to lure in clients by offering them things for free. Once in a while, advertising agencies and design studios will have special promotions, when skilled designers offer you a free banner design - most of the times high quality ones. By doing that, they hope you will appreciate their business and come back with future, paid jobs.

Free graphic design templates - free banner design templates are quite common online. You simply have to download the source file - most of the times an Adobe Photoshop PSD file and modify the text in a design software program.

The advantage of this solution is that you can choose from various layouts, designs and color palettes and you can personalize your banner as you wish. The downsize is that you need a graphic design title like Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro and some editing skills in order to modify the banner ad. Of course, the satisfaction that you get when you design a banner ad for free is also worth taking into consideration!

Banner sizes and custom advertising banner ad costs

There are different globally accepted banner size standards. These will often determine the cost of the custom advertising banner, but some companies offer a flat rate for any banner size. In most cases, however, advertisers will ask for more than just one banner size, but with all the custom banners following the same line and keeping with a unique color palette. Here are the most common custom advertising banner sizes you will find on the online market:

Although now-a-days creating a website is an integral part of every business model, just making a website according to what you think looks good and what you like is hardly a smart and creative idea.

It is very important to note that a well designed website can lead to online success but a badly designed website can have adverse effect on your reputation and hamper the potential growth of your business.

The chief reason why so many businesses fail to tap the potential of internet is due to the fact that although their products/services are better than their competitors, their website does not reflect the same, thus turning away potential clients and damaging the repute of the company.

When designing a website it is very important for you to understand that your on-line success depends on your website and if it is poorly designed the potential clients will not waste anytime in pressing the back button. So it is very important for you to have a professional web designing company handle the job of designing your website because they have the adequate knowledge and know-how to help you create a website the can cater to the needs of your target audience.

Apart from designing your website, professional web designing companies also offer various other services like web hosting, Search Engine Marketing and website copywriting and take care of your other web related needs. This can help enhance the visibility of your website and help you attract potential clients and lead to online success by building a unique brand for your products and services.

Although a professional website designing company can garner to a lot of your website related needs and offer a variety of services for improving your online business, website designing has many other crucial aspects that require an active participation on your part as well.

The most important thing for you to find out before going on with your website is to have clearly defined goals as to what you wish to achieve with your website and having a clear idea about your targeted audience is very significant. This requires lot of efforts and in depth research on your part as it will be of no use having a website which fails to grab the attention of your potential clients. It is also very important to highlight on your website what makes you different from others who offer similar services and also why should a client choose to work with you instead of your competitors. In other words it is very important that you identify your unique selling point and highlight it on your website. It is very important that a person visiting your website knows what makes you different from your competitors and other similar companies.

A professionally designed website can go long way in not only increasing the growth of your online business but also helping you build a brand image and enhancing your repute. A well designed website puts the right impression on your clients and helps you build a long term brand image for yourself and your company.

Although it is widely believed that putting up a website and having a Search Engine Optimization company (SEO) do the rest can lead to instant online success, it is hardly the truth. A SEO company may improve your search engine ranking enhance traffic to your site but it cannot guarantee that a person who clicks on your website stays on it. It cannot convert a visitor into clients that can only be done by a professionally designed website.

If your website does not appeal to the visitors than no matter how much money you spend on optimization of your site, it will give you no return if it is poorly designed but as a consequence it might hamper your brand image and damage long term reputation of the company.

Thus hiring a professional web site design company is worth its cost and can go a long way in enhancing your online success and developing a brand for your company.

So although web provides unlimited opportunities for success and different avenues for developing your business, it also takes a lot of efforts and thinking on your part before you create a website and take a plunge into the world of web.

A web site is a very commanding and an inexpensive marketing and advertising gizmo and a great way to develop your business into the online market world. Web Designing is an innovative work. For the millions and millions of web surfers, your web site is only the first impression of your business and your trustworthiness. The key concern in web design is how to add value to the user’s experience and how to make them feel that they are truly got something by visiting your web site.

Now-a-days in this www world, all industries are in a need of good looking and attractive website, but few are eager to pay for an expertly designed site. Business owners on the other hand want their site that attracts visitors and wants to bring them back again and again, and hopefully buying their services or products. But, it can be rather baffling to choose the right web site designer/ website designing company. Only a specialized well designed website will bring the visitors in, and even then it may not due to the amount of competition on the web.

Web design industry is one of the most hastily developing areas in the world of commerce. The sizzling growth of WWW has created a demand for web sites. As this is the known fact that Web Design is the never-ending topic but, most of the companies are in very good position to deliver wow-inducing services apart from the other competitors in the given market.

Web design is a composite discipline that rivets an extensive range of skills. In fact, I would go as far as to say that, web design is â€œinformation designâ€. So, before you really go for the website designing, make it sure that it answers the following queries:

- Is the site intelligent and organized?
- Does it load quickly?
- Is it user-friendly?
- Are the designs exclusive, unique and creative?
- Whether they have used latest technology while designing the site?

Designing web site which loads quickly doesnâ€™t signify that you have to compromise on the design. A diminutive effort on CSS and paying little bit more attention to the file sizes means that your site looks professional and loads quickly at the same time.

Only professional and extraordinary Web Design Company has positive answers to above questions and this result to a Successful Business.

There are many companies in India offering professional web design services and graphic design services with affordable rates. And also feel free to circulate and share out this as you wish - if you can post it on your own site or email it to your friends, then please do. Itâ€™s real time to reproduce the word far and wide amongst the all community across the world.

With the importance of the internet now long beyond debate, it has become imperative to have a strong web presence. One of the best ways of achieving this is through a well branded, professional and user friendly website that will help you to connect with and relate to your present and prospective customers.

Once you have realised your need for a website, the next step is to hire a professional web designer or web developer who possesses the expertise to translate your requirements into an information rich website, leaving you to concentrate on what you do best!

Hiring the right web designer can be a daunting task for those of us who lack the essential insights on what to look for in a good web designer.

Here are some tips that will help you in choosing the right Web Designer / Design Company:

1. Ensure That Your Site Has Quantifiable Goals

It is good practice to spend some time in planning and defining your website’s goals. Having clear and quantifiable goals for your website will help you in highlighting what you want your website to do and what is needed to get it done.

2. Purchase Your Own Domain Name

One of the smartest things you can do is to purchase your website domain name yourself as opposed to getting it done through the web designer. By purchasing your own domain name, you can make sure that you have complete control over your website. Web designers may come and go but the domain control will be yours.

3. Ask For Customer References

While you are in the process of choosing a Web Design Company, ask them for customer references, preferably with numbers you can call. Talking to past customers will help in knowing more about the designers, their expertise, style of working and respect for deadlines.

4. Establish Their Track Record

Building a good website is not a one time affair. To get real value from your website, it must be updated regularly. Hence, it pays to make sure that you can trust your web designer and make sure that they will still be in business years from now.

5. Check Their Designs

A good way to judge a web designer is by looking at websites they have designed recently and seeing if they are in a style you like. Pay attention to factors such as usability, navigation, layout and their potential to be found on the internet.

6. Meet Them At Their Offices

Before making a final decision on the web designer you choose to hire, meet them at their place of work. This will help you to know more about their setup, professionalism and style of doing business.

7. Pay For An Original Design

Never pay a web designer for a template. Not only will search engines penalise you for having non original content but you will have lost the chance to have a unique site developed that truly fits your requirements.

8. Check To See If The Designer Develops SEO Friendly Code & Uses CSS

Simply creating a pretty website is not enough in the midst of so much competition. Good designers understand that for a website to do well, it must be Search Engine Friendly (SEO) and should be designed using CSS instead of tables.

9. Site Should Confirm to Current Legislation

Make sure your website conforms to the current legislation. In the UK this includes the Disability Discrimination Act 1995, the Data Protection Act, the EU Freedom of Information Initiative and the Companies Act 2007.

More and more people are getting fond of web design. Whether for work related purposes or for personal-use purposes. Some people get short courses to study web designing and some rely on e-learning and get web designing tutorials on-line. For people who works as a web designer, they know the do’s and dont’s of web designing, for most of them at least. For those who don’t, especially those who are new in the field, here are some basic tips that would help in enhancing your web designing skills.

Keep your index page short

For the convenience of your visitor, don’t place all your content on the index page. Remember that you can use several pages on making a web site. Having a single-page site with all the contents there will make a visitor dizzy and confused.

Create a toolbar or menus easy navigation

This will make your visitors stay in your site longer. After reading the content of your page, it is more likely that your visitor will look for other pages on your site that would interest him. Using short, clear and precise words will also help the visitor know the content of the page where your link is going. I suggest to place the navigation menu on top and the other main links on the right hand side menu. You can also use a drop-down menus if you have many links.

Clean layout design

Align the contents of the page properly. You can use as many tables as you need to be able to insert the images or whatever you need for the page. Beginners tend to put as much images as they can, thinking it would be nice to look at, but it is advisable to put minimal photos. For a safer design, you can also use templates.

Use uniform fonts

As much as possible, use only two to three kinds of font face and the suggested sizes are ten to fourteen points. Just use different font styles, italics for instance, to emphasize keywords. Also, use a font that is available on all computers to prevent having a messed up design.

Cross browser compatible

Keep in mind that there are other internet browsers other than what you are using. At least make sure that your codes and design are compatible to the major browsers like Internet Explorer 5+, Mozilla Firefox 1.0, Opera 7.0 and Netscape Navigator 6+ .

These are just basic tips and suggestions on web designing but are guaranteed useful. These can be used as guide on building your own site but still the overall design is in your hands.

Joomla! is the latest buzzword in the IT world today. So what exactly is it? Joomla is a Content Management System that has a host of powerful online applications and also helps you in building websites. Joomla allows web designers as well as end-users to effortlessly and easily maintain and manage a dynamic website despite having little or no knowledge or proficiency of the code. This powerful content management system is controlled by a CSS stylesheet and one single XHTML document. Joomla gives the user total creative control over the appearance of the website by availing of the many Joomla templates available. Best of all, you donâ€™t have to pay thousands of dollars to avail of this award-winning software. Joomla is available free-of-charge for anybody to download.

How Joomla! templates help
With Joomla you wonâ€™t ever again need to hire a web designer for huge sums of money. You can choose a free Joomla template from the many available and build your own website or upgrade your existing one for free, and all this in less time than you ever thought possible. All it takes is a click of a button for you to change your website into a text editor right in the browser itself. With Joomla templates you can easily add new pages and add or edit pictures, menus and text as well as video and audio, then click the â€œSaveâ€ button and youâ€™re done! Thatâ€™s all it takes for you to design or re-design your own website- literally at the click of your fingers!!

What are Joomla! templates?
A Joomla template functions as a basic foundation design within the Joomla Content Management System. You could use a pre-made Joomla template or custom-make Joomla template for total creative control over the appearance of the website and presentation of the content. The Joomla template is designed so that when you insert your content, it inherits the colors, text size, navigation, link styles and menus of the template, giving your content a completely new look.

One of the advantages of Joomla is that flash joomla templates can be easily and instantly applied to give your website a totally new look. The graphics, positioning and colors can be altered without any change in content. Joomla templates that use CSS or cascading style sheets help to produce layouts without having to use tables. The advantage of this is it is easier to validate the template code to the standards of the World Wide Web Consortium and it also does better in search engines, loads faster and is easier to maintain.

How to create a Joomla! template
There are plenty of joomla template tutorials available online for all those who are intimidated at the thought of using Joomla to re-design their website. Go ahead and avail of a joomla video tutorial for a first-hand look at how to build joomla template as well as the many ways to use it.

Most online tutorials give you step-by-step explanations and instructions on all aspects of joomla including:
â€¢What is a joomla template, how it works and the difference between a template with and without content.
â€¢Components of a template and the functions they perform.
â€¢The unique process of designing an active web page as opposed to a static (X)HTML web page.
â€¢How to build joomla template.
â€¢How to use a pre-made joomla template as well as how to custom-make joomla template to suit your own individual preferences.
â€¢How to create layouts using the innovative cascading style sheets instead of conventionally used tables.
â€¢Joomlaâ€™s table-less design and its implications with regards to the World Wide Web Consortium standards.
â€¢How to style modules and place them as well as new techniques and tricks for rounded corners, variable page widths and text resizers.